Maxamed Abu-maye
Contact Information
Assistant Professor, African American and Africa Studies
Areas of Expertise
- African Studies, Somali Studies, Immigration, Critical Refugee Studies, Careral Studies
Education
- Ph.D., University of California, San Diego
- M.A., Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego
- B.A., Sociology, University of Illinois
Maxamed Abu-maye, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University.
Maxamed Abu-maye is the author of the book Black Muslim Refugee: Militarism, Policing, and Somali American Resistance to State Violence (University of California Press, 2025). This multisited project, the first of its kind, exposes the links between US military violence abroad and police brutality at home through a profound exploration of Somali refugee lives. Black Muslim Refugee traces the globe-spanning journeys of these refugees, from civil war–era Somalia to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya to their eventual arrival in San Diego, and Maxamed Abu-maye analyzes their experiences through the dual lenses of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia. He situates their displacement within the larger context of East Africa's colonial history, as well as the policy consequences of the American-backed war on terror and war on drugs. Throughout, Abu-maye's centering of Somali subjectivity underlines this community's critical and creative capacity to defy the mechanisms that seek to "manage" and ultimately control them.